Welcome to the Forward’s coverage of Jewish culture. Here, you’ll learn about the latest (and sometimes earliest) in Jewish art, music, film, theater, books as well as the secret Jewish history of everything and everyone from The Rolling Stones to…
Culture
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I have seen the future of America — in a pastrami sandwich in Queens
San Wei, which serves pastrami sandwiches along with churros and biang biang noodles, represents an immigrant's fulfillment of the American dream
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Poland Looks to Hollywood To Transform Wartime Image (and Shift Holocaust Narrative)
WARSAW — Poland’s new conservative rulers think their country faces an image problem abroad and they want Hollywood to produce a Polish equivalent of “Braveheart” or “Pearl Harbor” to promote their country’s positive place in history. They also are looking to alter the narrative when it comes to Poland, where most of the Nazi death…
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The Fight to Reclaim Islam
Islam and the Future of Tolerance: A Dialogue By Sam Harris and Maajid Nawaz Harvard University Press, 144 pages, $17.95 In a controversial address last year, President Obama made clear that the Islamic State is “not Islamic.” “No religion,” he explained, “condones the killing of innocents.” By declaring the Islamic State group to be an…
The Latest
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How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Be a Mensch
For about four years, I was a dedicated student in a yeshiva that eventually became a vacuum cleaner repair shop. Like many of my peers growing up in a Modern Orthodox neighborhood on Long Island, I went to a yeshiva in Israel after I graduated high school. That time was an unmitigated disaster; I spent…
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Carrie Brownstein Plays the ‘Hunger’ Games
Hunger Makes me a Modern Girl By Carrie Brownstein Riverhead Books, 256 pages, $27.95 The title of Carrie Brownstein’s recently released memoir, “Hunger Makes Me a Modern Girl,” comes, as any Sleater-Kinney fan will giddily tell you, from one of the songs on her band’s album “The Woods” (which was released shortly before the group’s…
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Classic Yiddish Operetta ‘The Golden Bride’ Revived for a New Generation
(JTA) – “For a German Jew, Yiddish is beneath contempt,” musicologist Michael Ochs told JTA. “German Jews tend to think of Yiddish as bad German. The only use we had in our family for it was to make fun of it.” So it is more than a tad ironic that it was Ochs, whose family…
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Meet The Schlep Sisters, the Jewish Ladies of Burlesque
It’s early on a Saturday evening and I’m following Minnie Tonka and Darlinda Just Darlinda, hereafter known as the burlesque duo The Schlep Sisters, through the streets of downtown Brooklyn. We make our way to Mark Morris Dance Center, where Darlinda promptly plunks a blinged out menorah down onto the table. Gold stilettos are whipped…
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The Jews of Al-Jazeera
Broadcasting icon Dave Marash is all too familiar with the label “self-hating Jew,” and it’s a phrase he holds in the deepest contempt. “I’m not a pious or practicing Jew, but I’ve always identified myself as Jewish,” he said during a phone interview from his home in New Mexico. “My humor is Jewish — very…
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Books Barack Obama’s Favorite Book of 2015 is by Lauren Groff
'Fates and Furies' gets his stamp of approval
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Music Why Do So Many Grammy Nominees Have Jewish Grannies?
Bob Dylan has a funny history with the Grammy Awards. He didn’t win a single Grammy for any of his truly groundbreaking and most amazing work in the 1960s – the songs that everyone thinks of when you say “Bob Dylan” – nor for his mid-1970s triumph, his comeback album “Blood on the Tracks.” It…
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Our Favorite Hanukkah Toy Was Actually a Non-Jewish Irish Gambling Game
With the arrival of Hanukkah comes the reemergence of dreidels from closets, drawers and cupboards. These tops are a beloved part of the holiday — but where did they actually come from? Like many things in Jewish history, the story that most of us heard about dreidels as children is entirely ahistorical. There were no…
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The Jewish Secrets of Video Game Guru Ralph Baer
Jewish inventor Ralph H. Baer’s workshop desk isn’t exactly messy, but the 180 items on it represent the sort of organized chaos that cliché prescribes for brilliant minds. On a shelf sits his 1978 invention Simon, the iconic game with red, yellow, blue and green buttons that calls upon players to follow increasingly difficult sound…
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Fast Forward Why the Antisemitism Awareness Act now has a religious liberty clause to protect ‘Jews killed Jesus’ statements
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News School Israel trip turns ‘terrifying’ for LA students attacked by Israeli teens
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Culture Cardinals are Catholic, not Jewish — so why do they all wear yarmulkes?
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Music After decades of waiting, we’re finally getting a Bob Dylan-Barbra Streisand duet
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Fast Forward Explainer: What the Israeli occupation of Gaza would mean for Israelis and Palestinians
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Yiddish אויסשטעלונג אין אונגערן — רמזים פֿון הילצערנער שיל פֿון 18טן יאָרהונדערטExhibit in Hungary displays remnants of 18th century wooden synagogue
אינעם 18טן יאָרהונדערט איז די קהילה אין נאַזנאַ געווען די צווייט גרעסטע אין גאַנץ טראַנסילוואַניע.
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News Is the crackdown on pro-Palestinian activism the new Red Scare?
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Opinion Trump’s cuts are a war on Jewish literature, thought and history itself
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